This blog is intended to cover side issues emerging from the discussions of artefact collecting (including metal detecting) on my "Portable Antiquities and Heritage Issues" blog. This allows answering misleading points which may require it without sidetracking of other discussions onto unrelated topics, thus freeing the main blog for more serious stuff.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Artefact Collectors' Thin Arguments, Thin Skins

Coin Collecting archaeologist John Rieske complains on the artefact collectors' email discussion group Unidroit-L:"I have recently received unsolicited email attcks from Mr. Barford. They are now consigned to the spam bin for permanent disposal. john". Apart from the ability to boast that he has a "spam bin" as if nobody else had one, this is a strange thing to say. He posted something on Moneta-L which seemed not to have the ring of truth, so I queried it off-list. A request for clarification, and hardly an "attack", but it seems those who have thing arguments have thin skins. Here is the first post I sent , dated 15th May, in reply to the Unidroit-L message:

Are you referring to the Mir Zakah hoards?They were discovered in 1992, and on the market in Peshawar (which is of course in Pakistan, not Afghanistan) in 1994. So this was during the period of the civil war between Mujahadin groups. The Taliban only began their rise to power 1996-8 and their international recognition was later still. So is this in fact true?:> Since these coins were sold by the then recognized government of> Afghanistan by most nations at the time, why then would these coins be> considered illicit? <

News reports at the time indicated they were on the market illicitly, and the Kabul government had not sanctioned them leaving the country. So who according to you sold these coins to the people selling them to US buyers?

Do you have any of these coins? Paul Barford

[I was pretty sure that what he was referring to were the Mir Zakah hoards]

This is the second, replying to his assertion as though it is a fact everybody should know that somebody was calling these hoards "the Taliban hoards" since it was the Taliban who were being financed by their sale, I wrote:

Thanks. Called by whom? You seem to be the person making these claims.

[I had not come across any other mention of the phrase "the Taliban hoards" anywhere, hardly an "attack", just a request for clarification].

My third and final message sent soon after that was

ah, it seems to be a spelling mistake for "hordes"http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1SMSN_ENPL351&q=the+%22Taliban+Hoards%22&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai= Thanks

There was no reply to the second or third messages, stating where Mr Rieske had actually come across the term "The Taliban Hoards".

Then we learn today that he'd been getting "unsolicited email attcks from Mr. Barford", when my queries were prompted by his posting false information to a discussion list, and drawing false conclusions from this information. It does not say much for numismatists and their dediation to scholarly debate when an attempt to establish the true facts behind a discovery is treated as an "attack".

Of course pretending to be offended is a good ploy to escape from answering and having perhaps to say "ooops I was mistaken".

[By the way his comment on International recognition was questioned by another poster on the moneta-L list]

About Me

British archaeologist living and working in Warsaw, Poland. Since the early 1990s (or even longer) a primary interest has been research on artefact hunting and collecting and the market in portable antiquities in the international context and their effect on the archaeological record.